Ocasio-Cortez: Come With Me to Israel

Dear Alexandria,
Congratulations on your recent inspiring and well-earned victory in New York’s 14th Congressional District. Your win shows that a positive message, great organizing and engagement with the disconnected can transform politics and help put America back on track.

I write to you as a progressive and a Zionist. There is often much rancor toward Israel among progressives. Too many see the conflict in strictly black-and-white terms. The few public statements you have made about Israel and Palestine, most recently in the wake the recent violence and tragic deaths at the Gaza border, indicate to me a less than nuanced perspective. 

Did you know that many of the early founders of Zionism were 19th-century socialist Jews from Eastern and Central Europe who believed that human dignity was to be found in just and equal access to work, health care and education? Many of Israel’s early builders were committed to a vision of Zionism that was predicated on the shared destiny of Jews and Palestinians living together in the land.

And though Israel’s government is right wing, many people on both sides are fighting for justice for all. As a leader, I have been devoted to the notion of an independent Israel living in peace and coexistence with an independent Palestine. The two-state solution is the only hope for peace.

I have held this position when Israel and the United States were led by presidents in favor of or opposed this view. During times of extremist terror, racist reprisals and periods of hope and reconciliation, I’ve never wavered in my view that the Jewish and Palestinian people have just claims to their shared homeland. A full recognition of each other’s claim is the only path forward for peace.

There is often much rancor toward Israel among progressives. Too many see the conflict in strictly black-and-white terms. 

This conflict too often degenerates into competing claims, zero-sum solutions and hateful, violence-inducing rhetoric that results in the spilling of innocent blood. As a student of history, I’m often disturbed by the ways historical reality gets distorted by hatred. Jewish people have had a 3,000-year connection to the land. One can walk around Jerusalem’s ancient settlements that were inhabited by Jews from the era of King David to the prophet Isaiah; from Alexander the Great to King Herod and Jesus; through the pain of Roman exile and a thriving Diaspora; and finally to the modern era’s 19th-century Zionist movement, which revitalized the Hebrew language, established a state (through U.N. acclamation) and won independence in 1948.

But as a Jew, I am also commanded to encounter “the other,” Arab and Palestinian people who also claim the land as their own. As a Jew, I am obligated to listen, to understand and to remain committed to the idea that knowledge and inquiry and education remain essential if both peoples are to be truly free.

I’m in Israel each year, visiting friends and leading groups to help them understand their unique historical connection to the land and the importance of engaging Israelis and Palestinians who are working tirelessly to forge a lasting peace. We visit the Hand in Hand schools, Israel’s only bilingual public school system, dedicated to coexistence for its thousands of Israeli and Palestinian students; we visit projects at the Gaza border, helping connect Palestinians and Israelis seeking an alleviation of the terrible conditions within Gaza; and we help strengthen organizations dedicated to fair and equal treatment before the law with organizations like the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

Through all these visits and more, we learn that the most promising path forward is engagement, dialogue, and productive relationships that are the foundation for peace between Jews, Muslims and Christians in Israel and Palestine.

I’d encourage you to consider a short trip to Israel and Palestine. I’ll take you and there introduce you to leaders across racial, ethnic, religious, class and generational spectrums who are working each day in a positive and constructive way to build the two-state solution and the chance for peace for Israelis and Palestinians.

In the meantime, congratulations on your impressive victory. And if you want to visit Israel and Palestine, give me a call. I promise a thrilling adventure that will be anything but black and white.

---

Rabbi Andy Bachman is executive director of the Jewish Community Project of Lower Manhattan.  

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A Letter to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Dear Alexandria,
Congratulations on your recent inspiring and well-earned victory in New York’s 14th Congressional District. Your win shows that a positive message, great organizing and engagement with the disconnected can transform politics and help put America back on track.

I write to you as a progressive and a Zionist. There is often much rancor toward Israel among progressives. Too many see the conflict in strictly black-and-white terms. The few public statements you have made about Israel and Palestine, most recently in the wake the recent violence and tragic deaths at the Gaza border, indicate to me a less than nuanced perspective. 

Did you know that many of the early founders of Zionism were 19th-century socialist Jews from Eastern and Central Europe who believed that human dignity was to be found in just and equal access to work, health care and education? Many of Israel’s early builders were committed to a vision of Zionism that was predicated on the shared destiny of Jews and Palestinians living together in the land.

And though Israel’s government is right wing, many people on both sides are fighting for justice for all. As a leader, I have been devoted to the notion of an independent Israel living in peace and coexistence with an independent Palestine. The two-state solution is the only hope for peace.

I have held this position when Israel and the United States were led by presidents in favor of or opposed this view. During times of extremist terror, racist reprisals and periods of hope and reconciliation, I’ve never wavered in my view that the Jewish and Palestinian people have just claims to their shared homeland. A full recognition of each other’s claim is the only path forward for peace.

There is often much rancor toward Israel among progressives. Too many see the conflict in strictly black-and-white terms. 

This conflict too often degenerates into competing claims, zero-sum solutions and hateful, violence-inducing rhetoric that results in the spilling of innocent blood. As a student of history, I’m often disturbed by the ways historical reality gets distorted by hatred. Jewish people have had a 3,000-year connection to the land. One can walk around Jerusalem’s ancient settlements that were inhabited by Jews from the era of King David to the prophet Isaiah; from Alexander the Great to King Herod and Jesus; through the pain of Roman exile and a thriving Diaspora; and finally to the modern era’s 19th-century Zionist movement, which revitalized the Hebrew language, established a state (through U.N. acclamation) and won independence in 1948.

But as a Jew, I am also commanded to encounter “the other,” Arab and Palestinian people who also claim the land as their own. As a Jew, I am obligated to listen, to understand and to remain committed to the idea that knowledge and inquiry and education remain essential if both peoples are to be truly free.

I’m in Israel each year, visiting friends and leading groups to help them understand their unique historical connection to the land and the importance of engaging Israelis and Palestinians who are working tirelessly to forge a lasting peace. We visit the Hand in Hand schools, Israel’s only bilingual public school system, dedicated to coexistence for its thousands of Israeli and Palestinian students; we visit projects at the Gaza border, helping connect Palestinians and Israelis seeking an alleviation of the terrible conditions within Gaza; and we help strengthen organizations dedicated to fair and equal treatment before the law with organizations like the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

Through all these visits and more, we learn that the most promising path forward is engagement, dialogue, and productive relationships that are the foundation for peace between Jews, Muslims and Christians in Israel and Palestine.

I’d encourage you to consider a short trip to Israel and Palestine. I’ll take you and there introduce you to leaders across racial, ethnic, religious, class and generational spectrums who are working each day in a positive and constructive way to build the two-state solution and the chance for peace for Israelis and Palestinians.

In the meantime, congratulations on your impressive victory. And if you want to visit Israel and Palestine, give me a call. I promise a thrilling adventure that will be anything but black and white.

---

Rabbi Andy Bachman is executive director of the Jewish Community Project of Lower Manhattan.  

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A Dangerous Disconnect: Making Millennials Proud of Israel

It seems as though we wake up every other morning to the news of a new “crisis” that is breaking down the relationship between Israel and the American-Jewish community. Coalition politics and religious observance continue to mix in unnatural ways, sparking the ire of American Jewish leaders and Israeli decision-makers who simply cannot find common ground, though they no doubt value the same things.

The underlying issue, and the reason why this relationship continually cycles back to discord and discontent, is that the two sides do not view their alliance through the same prism. In fact, they never have.

While Israelis see themselves as the custodians of the Jewish homeland and seek unquestioned support from their brothers and sisters in the United States, those in the American Jewish community simply cannot see beyond their decades-old role as benefactors of the Zionist dream. And who can blame them?

For seven decades, American Jewry has been investing in a state that they believed would showcase the very best of Jewish values. Thus far, however, it is a haphazard work-in-progress that irks and confuses them at every turn. While cultural differences no doubt contribute to the contention, the fact remains that Israel is far from the paragon of virtue that its American investors had hoped for, and they are growing weary. What’s more, our Jewish millennials cannot and do not want to connect to an entity that does not represent their values.

The fact remains that Israel is far from the paragon of virtue that its American investors had hoped for.

But we cannot allow Israel to be seen as a disappointment, nor a charity case. After all, it is the only country we can truly call our own, and we know in our hearts that we can do better, that so much more is possible. As such, the onus is on Israel to give American Jews, especially millennials in search of their identities, new reasons to want to connect with the land of our shared heritage, starting with profound pride in our ability to focus our renowned innovative abilities on societal advancement.

As I see it, the change we seek begins with a paradigm shift, from the intense fear upon which Israel was built and continues to run, to one of diversity and acceptance.

Although years have passed since the Holocaust and our bittersweet victory in the War of Independence, we are still plagued by thoughts of bloodshed and loss, and we continue to construct walls to keep out those who swore to kill us and drive us into the sea. In the process, we have constructed invisible barriers — within ourselves and throughout our national infrastructure — to keep our neighbors, our fellow citizens, at arm’s length.

We live as one people divided, never truly acknowledging our shared nationality because of a preoccupation with divisive labels — Ashkenazi and Sephardic, secular and religious, Jews and Arabs — and Israel’s growth has stalled. What’s more, Israel stands on the brink of financial and ideological bankruptcy because of this pervasive culture of exclusion that infects almost every aspect of Israeli life, as well as an educational system that is inaccessible to the country’s minorities.

So, we must start there, with educational opportunities for all that will solidify our economic health and change the face of our shared society.

We have no need for another ivory tower, nor can we accept more empty promises about multicultural programming from our government officials. Rather, we must establish educational frameworks that empower populations that are otherwise underrepresented in Israeli higher education, including men and women from ultra-Orthodox, Ethiopian and Arab backgrounds and individuals with disabilities, to develop a voice all their own, make a seamless transition into the workforce, and become productive citizens of the new Israel.

Our universities must teach applied studies that are economically relevant to all who wish to learn. We must insist on excellence and creativity, and employ the best and most diverse faculty and staff that Israel has to offer. And above all, we must harness the power of education to promote diversity and inclusion and produce leadership that mends social gaps.

What I have outlined above describes the educational programming at Ono Academic College, the “social startup” that I launched more than 22 years ago, which now boasts more than 14,500 students from across Israel’s religious, cultural and ethnic spectrum, and satellite campuses in major cities and development towns around the country. But although we have seen seeds of success on our own campuses, having helped thousands of students from all sectors of Israeli society achieve personal fulfillment and professional success, I understand that we are still a startup, that this is just the beginning of something much bigger.

The real success will come when institutions like Ono are no longer the exception but the rule, when multiculturalism becomes part and parcel of Israeli life, and when we as a nation actively strive to identify and eliminate the barriers that prevent the full participation of minorities at school, at work and in our communities.

When equity guides our decisions about social reform and Israel becomes a place where conflicting visions and ideologies are welcome, we not only will become the bastion of Jewish values that American Jewry had always dreamed of, but we will capture the attention — and the imagination — of the entire world. By reshaping higher education in Israel into a training ground for inclusion and multicultural understanding, we will create new points of connection for Jewish millennials around the world, and we even will find new reasons to believe in ourselves.

---

Ranan Hartman is founder and CEO of Ono Academic College, a model of multicultural graduate and undergraduate programming and education-based social reform, as well as the fastest-growing institute of higher education in Israel.

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Writing Our Own Rituals for a Modern World

// via Otterbein University

The nature of brachot (blessings) in the Jewish tradition is to elevate the mundane, to make everyday life moments holy by pausing to appreciate them and identify them as special within the myriad moments of a given day. But sometimes a life moment demands more than an uttered blessing: It calls for a ritual.

While the word ritual may, for many, connote something that’s been done repeatedly over decades or centuries (starting the cycle of Torah reading over again every year), or several times over the course of a year (blessing the new moon), in its strictest definition, a ritual is “a religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order.” A blessing can be part of a ritual, but technically, a ritual needs more than a blessing to be a ritual.

We have many secular rituals. We wake up, check our phones, visit the bathroom to do what we do there before making coffee; for some, it’s coffee first and then everything else. If we’ve got kids, we wake and dress them, make lunches and take them to school; then we report to work, take a lunch break, go home, make dinner, watch TV, go to sleep. These are a series of actions, but don’t fit the strictest interpretation of being a “religious or solemn ceremony,” all due respect to our morning coffee.  

There are lots of Jewish rituals: throwing bread into a body of water to symbolize the casting off of sins; twirling a chicken overhead while promising to donate it to charity; covering mirrors in a house of mourning; dipping completely beneath the water of the mikveh, the (here it comes, it’s even in the name of the thing) ritual bath, three times until a witness proclaims your immersion “kosher.” These are “official” rituals, validated by rabbis, implemented through decades of communal practice. “Fiddler on the Roof” teaches us that there is a blessing for everything, even the czar, but there isn’t a ritual for everything. Or at least, there isn’t a rabbinically crafted, communally ratified ritual for everything.

“Fiddler on the Roof” teaches us that there is a blessing for everything but there isn’t a ritual for everything.

As participants at the recent (RE)VISION conference hosted by the Jewish Emergent Network earlier this month discovered, meaningful ritual can be crafted by committee or by individuals, not just by rabbinic communal leaders. In two workshops called Ritual 360, Naomi Less, associate director and founding ritual leader of New York’s Lab/Shul, and actress and rabbi Jessica Kate Meyer charged participants to create new Jewish rituals to commemorate occasions that aren’t already Judaically ritualized.

Two groups focused on rituals around moving into or out of a house: While the ritual included mezuzahs, they were not central, making way for things like collecting one last item from each room, inspired by the search for chametz the night before Passover, and reciting quotes from Jewish liturgy and/or popular culture that center on the theme of “home.” One group created a Jewish memorial service for a beloved pet, which included sharing favorite memories, and some Hebrew readings about God’s role in creating all creatures, big and small. And the final group did a dramatic improvisation of two parents marking their teenager’s receipt of his driver’s license, including the traveler’s prayer, to remind the teen of God’s role in making sure we reach our destinations. In the future, this ritual definitely should be called a “car mitzvah.”

As a non-rabbi with lots of ritual experience from a lifetime of living Jewishly, the ideas about how to mark transitional moments meaningfully came to me fluidly. I drew on my day school education, my knowledge of the liturgy, Camp Ramah, my literary experience of symbolism, my love of finding just the right words, and my knowledge of popular culture to help craft a ritual that was meaningful, personalizable and accessible. But in the back of my mind lurked a rogue snippet of educational code that cried out in panic: that ritual is for rabbis and religious leaders to create, and for the community to repeat.

This workshop presented the idea that ritual is at its best when it’s crafted with personal meaning. It can include a rabbi, but it doesn’t require one. We are required only to listen to ourselves, to think deeply about the moment we are trying to mark with ceremony, to identify the way in which this moment will transform us, and find the symbolic objects that will play a role in elevating that occasion as holy.

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A Penalty Kick in the Pants

Iran's Mehdi Taremi looks dejected after the match REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes

Want to know a secret? 

I’m an Iranian American and I didn’t give a damn about Iran in its recent World Cup games. 

But thousands of others in Los Angeles did, especially in Westwood, where they watched the games and wildly cheered for Iran.

These fans passionately argue that the players represent the people, not the regime, and are hence deserving of support. 

I can also try to separate the athletes from the regime. I know they had no choice, but their jerseys bore the official flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran — the one I saw every day before my family escaped Iran; the one that has “Allahu Akbar”  on it because Iran has made it hideously known that it has no separation of religion and state. 

My friend Matin, an Iranian-American Jew who came to the United States at age 12, considers Iran his “national team.” He completely separates the sport from “politics.” He even cried when Iran drew with Portugal and thus failed to advance to the World Cup’s knockout rounds.

Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, yet people cheer for its soccer team.

Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, yet people cheer for its soccer team at game-viewing parties around the world. But if Israel hosted a local hummus-tasting contest, there would be protesters.

And therein lies the ugly hypocrisy: There are many people here, including non-Iranians, who I am certain would condemn the Iranian regime while cheering for the Iranian team but would never extend the same courtesy to Israeli athletes (not to mention artists, academics and musicians), insisting that they be boycotted because they’re Israeli. 

These folks would argue: But the Iranian people don’t represent their government! They have no choice over their leaders because they live in a dictatorship! Israelis, however, get to elect their leaders, so their government represents them, and you can’t make the comparison! 

I wonder: If the far-left were to sweep Israeli elections and enact policies that would satiate the insatiable appetites of Israel’s detractors, would calls for boycotts against Israel somehow magically cease? If Israel were to elect its own version of Bernie Sanders and even pull out of the West Bank, would Argentina be able to play in Jerusalem without threats to its star player? 

On Facebook, another Iranian-American Jewish friend condemned Mehdi Taremi, an Iranian player who last year retweeted Ayatollah Khamenei’s promise that Israel won’t be around in 25 years. To their credit, many Iranian exiles demanded he be banned from the World Cup.

In response to my friend’s post, one of her local Iranian friends asked why she would “abandon the entire team for one player’s tweet?” adding, “[The] reality is Persian Jews consider themselves Israeli not Iranian and that’s the real reason you’re not cheering for them. And the rest of us real Iranians are just fine with that.”

Real Iranians. 

If I’m not a real Iranian, I’d like to know why all of my ancestors are buried in Iran and why my 2-year-old has such impressive facial hair.

My friend who wrote the original post responded, “Sorry… when the country you were born in steals all your land, property, tortures your uncle, imprisons another, and espouses horrific anti-Semitism — I don’t feel a connection to it. Seriously, can you blame us?!” She also affirmed that her friend who wrote the insensitive comment was not an anti-Semite, and after he clarified his words, even I believed he hadn’t meant to appear racist. But I grew so tired of the debate that I put my phone away and ate my body weight in kabob.

Not Iranian.

Call me what you want: a dual loyalist, less “Iranian,” a hypocrite for highlighting the evils of boycotts against Israel but not separating Iran’s team from its government. Others, like Mehdi Taremi, have it much worse. The forward had a great scoring opportunity but missed in the final minutes against Portugal — a goal that would advanced his team to the next round — thus destroying Iran’s World Cup dreams. 

I’m eager to see if he’ll be around in 25 years.

---

Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer.

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Discovering Our Commonality

Pick a right-wing Jew, A left-wing Jew, an Orthodox Jew, a Reform Jew, a secular Jew, a settler Jew and a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Jew. Now, assemble them into a creative team that has to work with one another to solve a problem by collaborating on evolving a big, breakthrough idea.  

The assignment has absolutely nothing to do with anything Jewish. 

What will come out of this exercise? 

The team will be thrown into a common struggle in which its members have to depend on one another. They will learn together how to dive into tension, hold that tension and then evolve an extraordinary idea out of that tension. Through the intimacy of this work, they will discover one another’s talents and personalities. They will jointly accomplish something that improves the world whether it is a product, a service, a cause or even an app. This process will have bonded them as human beings who shared a challenge in their lives and found a solution together. 

Now, can we stiff-necked Jews (an expression directly from the Torah) do this for the Jewish world? 

Creativity has a spectrum of powers. It is fueled by ideas. Ideas change the world, a community, a situation. Creativity becomes a common language between the creators, regardless of what languages they speak every day. No matter what opposing beliefs they have. 

We too often demonstrate that what divides us is stronger than what unites us.  

We Jews, regardless of our extreme differences, also share a common creative language and spirit. This reality made itself evident seven years ago when my good friend (and Journal Editor-in-Chief) David Suissa and I spent two consecutive, long, solid days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, consulting on the creative process with 32 Los Angeles-based Jewish organizations. It was after the first day of 16 organizations that David and I looked at each other and arrived at the same conclusion. We had just met in intimate conversation with Jewish organizations — right, left, religious, Charedi, secular, gay, social service, dating and synagogues — Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Zionist — and found an uncanny common thread. 

These Jews were a very busy people, creating Jewish life through these organizations with a fervor that indeed appeared holy, whether they were believers or not. They were compelled to create this Jewish life, in all its diversity, from their souls. By having been immersed in this variety for a full intense day, we could now stand back and see these intangible Jewish realities and their vibrant commonality.

In the Jewish world, just as Hebrew is our common language, so is creativity. It has been with us since the second word of the Torah — barah — “created,” as well as in the story of Bezalel, who designed the Holy Ark. King Solomon wrote the Song of Songs, the musical backdrop to so many Israeli folkdances and Jewish weddings. We create communities and a country. We re-created our language. 

Jewish organizations and foundations indeed reward Jewish creativity. But the rewards are issued in vertical communities. We never look at the Jewish world as a whole. We never encourage collaborative Jewish creativity across our internal borders because we believe it is impossible. We too often demonstrate that what divides us is stronger than what unites us. 

I remember 35 years ago when the United Jewish Appeal branded itself as Am Echad, “We are One.” During the first years, we Jews were emotionally proud of that slogan. But as time went on, the slogan was killed in favor of the new reality we embraced that we are not one, we are many, we are diverse. True, but we are also one. Can’t we balance that tension and accept both? 

Perhaps our way forward right now, when we create so much grinding tension between us, is to assemble ourselves into creative teams, across all those Jewish boundaries. We would have to work together, see one another as human beings and partners, understand one another and then share the common excitement and accomplishment of evolving big ideas and solutions. 

We might find we even like one another.

---

Gary Wexler is an adjunct professor in the master’s in communication program at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.  

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The Feminist Case for Courtship

One of the unintended consequences of the #MeToo movement is that it has given those of us who have been out of the dating world for a while a sense of what today’s post-romantic hookup culture is like.

To be blunt, it’s not pretty. 

Hurt feelings, misread cues, wandering eyes, unilateral one-night stands. Sure, much of that happened before, when we were under some version of that antiquated word: courtship. But perhaps most ironically, the new post-romantic culture hurts — disempowers — women the most. Which is why the original feminists, 100 years ago, had no issue with courtship. 

So, as a hopeless romantic, I hereby offer up the feminist case for returning to courtship:

Courtship is based on the immutable fact that there are biological differences between the sexes. In my 20s, I, like thousands of women, desperately tried to treat dating like a typical guy. From initiating interest to one-night stands, I followed the prevailing feminist wisdom. And then the next day, when the guy inevitably didn’t call, I tried, desperately, to will away all negative feelings: I can do this, I would say to myself, over and over again. 

But I couldn’t. I felt really lousy the next day, even if he did call. At this point, I need to offer up the Bell Curve Proviso: Of course there are some women who can do this sort of thing and not think twice; they can completely separate their emotions from their bodies. But they are in the minority. Credit God, evolution, or some combination of the two: Most women are hardwired to put up stop signs against unwanted children.

Feminists in the past 50 years have tried to make us believe that these stop signs are cultural implants, that they can be willed or legislated away as easily as men who never do the dishes. Today we have so lost the distinction between biology and culture that inane “gender” theories percolate hourly.

Courtship weeds out players. Courtship takes work and fortitude. A guy has to call a woman; ask her out; plan a nice evening; and (often) be satisfied with a peck on the cheek afterward. Players have no interest in work and fortitude. They just want to have fun. And they will surely find plenty of women who, especially in their 20s, just want to have fun. 

But courtship is not geared just for marriage. It’s geared for long-term relationships. And even if most women put off marriage till their 30s, they still prefer to be in long-term relationships.

Men interested in the long haul act differently than those who aren’t. They just do.

According to anthropologist Helen Fisher, courtship has historically served as a perseverance test. Basic aspects of courtship — males wooing females with gifts of food — turn up throughout the animal world. The male common tern presents a fish to his lover; the male roadrunner, a lizard. Perhaps men should be grateful that sometimes a pizza will suffice.

Men interested in the long haul act differently than those who aren’t. They just do. 

Courtship creates gentlemen, and gentlemen are sexy. Both courtship and chivalry train men to act like gentlemen, and whether today’s “gender feminists” can admit it or not, self-obsessed emasculated men are not sexy. 

Gentlemen don’t push women to have sex before they’re ready. Gentlemen are genuinely interested in a woman’s needs and desires. Gentlemen don’t intentionally lead women on. Gentlemen call the next day. There is nothing less sexy than a man who abuses, uses or harasses women. Least sexy of all? Men who procreate and run.

Of course, courtship is hardly a surefire test of a man’s character and interest. Human history is filled with crafty Lotharios; seduction and deception can go hand in hand. And an overly rigorous courtship test could punish the man who is shy but who would nevertheless make a great boyfriend or husband. But courtship winnows out ambivalent men — and for a multitude of reasons, including the hookup culture, ambivalent men now seem to be more the norm than the exception.

One hundred years into feminism, I think we can safely return to the notion that biological differences in no way imply inferiority. Moreover, not recognizing differences undermines feminism and leaves many women miserable. Can we please return to romance — and reality?

---

Karen Lehrman Bloch is an author and cultural critic.

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